* Tom Ridge, former Homeland Secretary (from ’03-’05), this week said that “al-Qaida did experiments on anthrax in animals” — did AQ use the “Ames strain” like Dr. Garvey reports the CIA detected at the Afghan lab?

37 Responses to “* Tom Ridge, former Homeland Secretary (from ’03-’05), this week said that “al-Qaida did experiments on anthrax in animals” — did AQ use the “Ames strain” like Dr. Garvey reports the CIA detected at the Afghan lab?”

“The experiments were recorded in a stash of papers found hidden in Mosul University after Iraqi special forces recaptured the city from IS fighters.

They reveal one victim was fed thallium sulphate – a colourless, tasteless salt that can be dissolved in water – and began to suffer fever, nausea, and swelling of the stomach and brain before dying in agony ten days later. “

“Terrorists also injected a nicotine-based compound, said to have no antidote, into another victim who passed out within seconds and died hours later.”

“Ingredients for the poison are contained in cigarettes and vaping supplies”

First on CNN: ISIS creating chemical weapons cell in new de facto capital, US official says
By Ryan Browne and Barbara Starr, CNN
Updated 4:20 PM ET, Wed May 17, 2017

I’m certainly not a religious expert, but I saw yesterday a headline in passing that Trump said the jihadists are going to lose their soul.

Under their own belief system — under the applicable hadiths — I believe President Trump would be correct that the jihadists will lose their souls if they use chemical weapons to kill innocents or to poison food or water.

I guess the difficulty is that these operatives are not familiar with the applicable hadiths governing their belief system. The Big Guy probably knows, though.

Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, better read on the subject than the average jihadist, likely understands this and may have taken it to heart.

DXersaid

It was reported today that Joseph Lieberman is being considered by President Trump as the next FBI Director. Joseph Liberman is often quoted with Tom Ridge on how Donald Trump can protect America from bioterrorism.

Ridge served as governor of Pennsylvania and the first Secretary of Homeland Security. Liberman is a former Senator from Connecticut. They are co-chairs of the bipartisan Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense.

Leaders from more than 120 nations just concluded the Eighth Biological Weapons Convention Review Conference in Switzerland, which focused on the threat posed by biological terrorism. During the conference, the U.S. delegation urged countries to reduce that threat by implementing strategies for detecting and responding to bioweapons. The United States needs to heed its own advice. The country has been and continues to be ill prepared for a biological attack.

When President-elect Trump assumes the Oval Office this January, he has a unique opportunity to fulfill his promise to make America safe again—by taking steps to protect the nation from bioterrorism.

More than a year ago, the bipartisan Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense, which we chair, issued 87 recommendations for improving America’s biodefenses. They are easily achievable and require little extra funding. But they’d vastly improve our ability to detect, prevent and respond to biological attacks and major outbreaks.

Fifteen years after the deadly anthrax attacks in the U.S., and more than two years after Ebola reached America, our nation still lacks a centralized leader to coordinate prevention and response activities to these kinds of events. We also have no strategic plan or unified approach to coordinate the biodefense budgets of more than a dozen agencies.

In a new report, we have found that the government has made progress on just 17 of our recommendations and completed only two. Forty-six could have been accomplished by now.

We’ve known about biological risks for a long time. In 1999, President-elect Trump himself warned in his book The America We Deserve about the need to better prepare for the threat of bioterrorism by stockpiling medicines, for instance. Yet by 2010, a report from a bipartisan commission on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction had given the country an “F” for readiness against a bioterrorism attack.

The risk has only increased. Earlier this year, the Director of National Intelligence cautioned Congress about the ease with which bioweapons could move around the globe. Belgium has found members of ISIL in possession of biological weapons materials. Turkish officials recently uncovered an ISIL plot to contaminate the country’s water supplies. This spring, Kenya said they foiled a plan by the Islamic State to unleash anthrax in the east African nation.

Then there are the risks from naturally occurring pandemics—like the recent Zika and Ebola crises—or the repeated biological accidents by our own government labs. One federal report found that U.S. labs had mistakenly exposed nearly 1,000 workers to pathogens 199 times over just one year.

Such attacks could be devastating. An attack on our nation’s agricultural sector, for instance, could prove catastrophic. The agricultural supply chain is a trillion-dollar business and employs almost one in every ten American workers.

So what should President-elect Trump and the 115th Congress do when they take office?

For his part, Mr. Trump should immediately put the vice president in charge of the nation’s biodefense efforts. The absence at the White House of an individual with this kind of authority has led to disjointed interagency efforts and financial inefficiency, as the government’s responses to Ebola and Zika have demonstrated. The vice president should have the authority to review and advise on biodefense budget matters and to oversee a biodefense coordination council that includes representatives from the private and public sectors.

Congress must streamline oversight. At least 20 congressional committees have biodefense jurisdiction, but few spend much time on the issue. When a crisis arises, they all lose time providing reactive oversight and fighting over jurisdiction.

Lawmakers have started to take action. Congress just passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which will require the federal government to develop a comprehensive biodefense strategy. We also urge Congress to implement uniform budgeting and build preparedness measures into annual budgets, instead of relying on emergency funding bills that cost lives and financial resources.

These acts and the other measures we recommend don’t involve significant new spending. Most simply require better use of existing resources.

Next year offers a real chance for our leaders to get biodefense right. The risks are clear. So are the solutions. President-elect Trump and the new Congress must simply enact them.

DXersaid

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump will meet Wednesday afternoon with four FBI director candidates, just as he is facing fresh questions over his firing of James Comey.

Among the candidates, Trump will meet with 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate-turned-independent Joe Lieberman, a former senator who supported Republican Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.

DXersaid

President Trump is also consider Governor Frank Keating as FBI Director.

Frank Keating, before 9/11, played himself in the “Dark Winter” exercise that sought to ensure the country was prepared to defend against an anthrax attack. Bin Laden had announced in 1999 that it was a religious duty to develop anthrax as a weapon — and members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad had announced that Zawahiri would use anthrax against the US to retaliate for the rendering of Blind Sheik Abdel-Rahman.

A NATION CHALLENGED: THE DISEASE; Drills Predicted Gaps in Preparedness Seen in the Anthrax Response

By TODD S. PURDUM and ALISON MITCHELLOCT. 21, 2001

Terrorism experts warned for years that federal, state and local governments were ill prepared to handle a biological attack, and elaborate drills found glaring gaps in coordination, communication and command. This month, real life looked frighteningly like the practice runs.

As the nation grappled with anthrax, the F.B.I. at first took a letter that turned out to be harmless from NBC News to a New York City Health Department laboratory for testing; when a second letter, which did contain anthrax, was finally tested days later, technicians accidentally contaminated a special chamber in the lab, forcing its closing.

Officials in Florida told executives at a tabloid newspaper office on a Friday that there was no reason to close shop because a photo editor had died of anthrax, then shut the office down that Sunday after much of the staff had worked there all weekend.

And nowhere was confusion worse than at the seat of government on Capitol Hill. When more than two dozen workers were exposed to anthrax from a letter opened in the office of the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, the speaker of the House suggested wrongly that people were ”infected” and that spores were in the ventilation system. He sent his members home, while the Senate, which had raised the alarm, closed its offices but met as usual.

So far, one person has died and a handful out of thousands tested have been infected and are responding to treatment with antibiotics or are cured.

But repeated confusion about coordination, communication, politics, bureaucracy and science, amplified on television and the Internet 24 hours a day, also exposed many of the basic weaknesses in the nation’s sprawling and disparate emergency response system that the experts had warned about.

It was just the kind of confusion that drills like ”Dark Winter” — a make-believe smallpox attack staged this summer by several think tanks — had shown might occur.

”Today is a horrific reprise,” said Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, who played himself in the exercise, in which a million people were ”killed,” public order collapsed, state and federal officials disagreed over how to handle the situation and put out information, and the National Security Council wound up discussing the need for martial law.

Assessing how various levels of government have responded since anthrax killed the tabloid photo editor in Florida on Oct. 5, Mr. Keating said, ”There was too much contradictory information too soon,” instead of ”crisp, intelligent, accurate information that is not contradictory and confusing.”

DXersaid

My friend keeps asking if Sufaat made the anthrax used in these experiments on animals, and used in the anthrax mailings, then why didn’t they just keep making it?

Hambali was ready to flee Kandahar by mid-October 2001. Bombing might have encouraged the decision-making here.

In the next weeks, in Pakistan, he met Sufaat, the Malaysian helming the al-Qaeda anthrax program under Ayman Zawahiri.

They discussed reconstituting the anthrax lab in Southeast Asia.

But, alas, Sufaat, was picked up when he tried to enter Malaysia from Thailand in December 2001.

Rauf Ahmad was also picked up in December 2001.

Now as to whether Sufaat was successful in developing anthrax, Sufaat says publicly that he was but declines to identify the strain for me, pleading the Fifth when I asked him. (He was thrown in jail for another 8 years for withholding information about his terroristic activities)

He says media reports to the contrary — such as the ones my friend is relying upon — are mistaken.

So I guess it is a matter of who you believe — the Homeland director from 2003-2005 Tom Ridge, the Al Qaeda anthrax lab director Yazid Sufaat, and the CIA scientist Garvey who heads the Philly PD forensics who says Ames was detected — or some media reports.

DXersaid

On October 7, 2001, at 6:30 pm local time, the first wave of attack against the Taliban was launched. A group of United States Air Force (USAF) bombers consisting of five B-1s and ten B-52s took off from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. They were complemented by twenty-five United States Navy (USN) F-14s and F/A-18s strike aircraft from the aircraft carriers USS Carl Vinson and USS Enterprise in the North Arabian Sea.[1] The Royal Air Force (RAF) and USAF provided L-1011s, KC-135 and KC-10s to supply en route aerial refuelings to the USN aircraft.[2] Flown in from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, two B-2 Spirits also participated in the attack, as did the EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare aircraft.[3]

At 9:00 pm, USN, USAF, and Royal Navy (RN) forces launched several salvos totaling fifty Tomahawk cruise missiles against Taliban military and communications facilities and suspected terrorist training camps.[2] The timing was chosen to coincide with the arrival of the strike aircraft, which dropped a variety of bombs including Mk 82s, JDAMs, AGM-84s, AGM-154s and laser-guided bombs.[2] According to in-country sources reporting to CNN, targets within Kandahar included Taliban strongholds, as well as the houses of Arab foreigners who worked with the Taliban regime.

Comment: Now should my friend be surprised that Yazid Sufaat did not stay at the Kandahar lab to work with anthrax under the light of the exploding bombs? I’ve said Yazid Sufaat is affable and in love with his wife. I never said he was brave.

DXersaid

For example, a reporter could ask former agent Lambert about whether Tom Ridge, the former Homeland Security secretary (2003-2005), was mistaken when in 2015 he said that Al Qaeda “did experiments on anthrax on animals.”

“al-Qaida did experiments on anthrax on animals and ISIL talked about the use of bioweapons.”

The Fox News clip above is headlined “Tom Ridge on Iran’s rising influence in Iraq” a — and the interview was the week after the release of the report he did with others on the biological threat he feels the country faces.

DXersaid

* CIA and FBI Knew — or rather, upon proper analysis, should have known — Rauf Ahmad harvested “anthrax spore concentrate” for Al Qaeda for experiment on guinea pigs on “7-4-001” – the handwriting on anthrax spore concentrate is same as handwriting of Rauf Ahmad in correspondence planning anthrax lab with Ayman Zawahiri

DXersaid

It is any wonder that former lead Amerithrax investigator says that the FBI Laboratory was dragging its feet?

The Chair of the Dangerous Pathogens 2000 conference at which the Al Qaeda scientist’s Rauf Ahmad’s research on killing mice with anthrax was presented, worked at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Center while advising the FBI’s Amerithrax Investigation ; the paper Dr. Baillie presented was co-authored with sequencer of the Ames strain

DXersaid

At the Porton Down-sponsored Dangerous Pathogens 2000 Conference, Dr. Zawahiri’s infiltrating scientist Rauf Ahmad, in addition to presenting on the isolation of Bacillus Anthracis, presented on the detection of bacterial contamination in water.
Posted by Lew Weinstein on November 15, 2014

DXersaid

Michael Garvey, who last I looked was head of Philadelphia’s forensics, would be a great addition to a new Administration. Then maybe we could get to the bottom of the issue whether the Ames strain was detected at Sufaat’s lab as the CIA found — but the FBI disregarded. The FBI’s consultant was the former top guy at Porton Down who allowed Rauf Ahmad to visit and present on isolating anthrax at the annual conference sponsored by Porton Down.

DXersaid

Evan McMullin, a former CIA counterterrorism officer, will run for president as a third-party conservative alternative to Donald Trump.
CIA. Wharton Business School. Goldman Sachs. Former GOP Congressional Policy honcho.

He would be good on Al Qaeda. That’s what he did. He was on the scene and operational.

As for Trump, consider the LA Times, Op-Ed; “I was a Minuteman III nuclear launch officer. Take it from me: We can’t let Trump become president.”

If you are Republican and find that Trump does not represent the ideals of the party of Lincoln, then follow the lead of a growing number of Republicans concerned about the damage Trump would do to our country’s national security and global stability.

“Republican defectors of all stripes look for more serious contender than Trump”

“The elected Republican lawmakers who have jumped ship from presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign span east and west, north and south. Some are conservative, and others more moderate. They are men and women.

And to a person, they say Mr. Trump isn’t a serious enough candidate, either in personality or policy, for them to back him.”

DXersaid

DXersaid

The CIA’s detection of the Ames strain of b. anthracis in Afghanistan was discarded by the FBI due to different testing results, sampling procedures, and methodology used by the FBI and IC (“Intelligence Community”)
Posted by Lew Weinstein on April 30, 2015

Indeed, the Chair of the Dangerous Pathogens 2000 conference at which the Al Qaeda scientist’s Rauf Ahmad’s research on killing mice with anthrax was presented, worked at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Center while advising the FBI’s Amerithrax Investigation ; the paper Dr. Baillie presented was co-authored with sequencer of the Ames strain.

DXersaid

Yazid Sufaat was happy with the anthrax work when he stayed with KSM for 6 days in 2001 and when he reported to Dr. Ayman on the results of his research with virulent anthrax in August 2001 with Hambali; in his correspondence with DXer, he seems happy today also (and very much in love).

DXersaid

DXersaid

Yazid Sufaat says that, contrary to some media reports, he was successful in developing anthrax, but prefers other bugs; he views anthrax as good for sabotaging, but not killing
Posted by Lew Weinstein on April 30, 2015

DXersaid

DXersaid

USAMRIID did not produce any irradiation records relating to the August 28, 2000 175 ml Ames shipment and the June 27, 2001 340 ml Ames shipment – and has not produced any records that the Ames was ever shipped back out